“The new colony of South Australia faced many problems in its early years and yet by 1850 it seemed to have overcome them”
In 1836, a British fleet sailed to South Australia to begin their new colony. When they arrived in South Australia there were many issues that they faced. These included Surveying, Farming and Transport. There were also things that helped the colony progress such as mining. some things had been attended to straight away and some things had been attended to in the long run.
Surveying was the biggest problem that they had when they first started. Surveying was the process of finding land and considering if it was good enough for use. Delays began almost straight away with surveying. This was because Colonel William Light held the first group back because he still hadn’t found a good spot for the capital of South Australia. The surveying didn’t get much better from then on. There were many disagreements among the Board of Commissioners and Colonel William Light. They would disagree on the methods of Light’s Surveying (Gibbs, 1969). One thing that they would disagree on was that The process of Lights surveying wasn’t any good. Overall, Surveying has not progressed much since it began in 1836.
The wheat and the wool industry were the two main staples for farming. Farming began as soon as the first settlers arrived. Wool had a few issues and they were quite large ones too. The two major issues with wool were the lack of water, killing a lot of the sheep off from dehydration and diseases in the stock. The stock diseases slightly progressed eventually, but the lack of water didn’t. The first year that wheat was sown, they didn’t get any sown. The second year that it was sown, 20 acres were sown. This was not too good, but after about another two years, they got over 3,000 acres sown. In 1843 23,000 acres was sown and by 1850 41,807 acres was sown (PowerPoint). Overall, farming slightly progressed up to 1850.
Transport was need in the...